Fifth Alarm for That Haunted Fireman

SOMEWHERE in the five boroughs of New York City there may be a less appealing view, but this one is certainly a contender for the prize: the vantage point from the profoundly unscenic Roosevelt Island Bridge, on a dank and blustery March night, as you look straight down into the frigid East River.

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Denis Leary, top left, with Michael J. Fox in the season premiere of Rescue Me.

It’s no place anyone in his right mind would want to be. So it’s appropriate that this is where the crew of “Rescue Me” finds itself five days before the end of production on the coming season. The show has always specialized in watching the alcoholic firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), its not-entirely-sane protagonist, stare  well, really smirk  into the abyss. And here he goes again, during a scene in which three members of the crew of Ladder 62 try to talk down a jumper who has lost all his money in a Ponzi scheme.

Using the Madoff scandal as a throwaway joke in a scene that, like much of the series, could tilt toward black humor or tragedy, in this case literally depending on which way the wind blows, is fairly standard for “Rescue Me.” The show’s lean three-man writing staff  Mr. Leary, Peter Tolan (who created the show with Mr. Leary) and Evan Reilly  rarely writes more than two shows ahead of what is being shot. The writers like the freedom to run with whatever captures their interest and abandon what doesn’t. The day’s news, an actor’s on-set riff or an anecdote Mr. Leary hears from one of the two real-life firefighters on whom his character is based  all are grist for their scripts.

This season, however, they’re making a major exception, with a long-term commitment to a story line that returns the series to its painful origins. In Season 5 of “Rescue Me,” which begins Tuesday on FX, the specter of 9/11 becomes a major character once again, when a French journalist starts interviewing firefighters about their experiences for a commemorative book.

Tommy, his co-workers in the firehouse and his on-again-off-again lover Sheila (Callie Thorne), a 9/11 widow who was married to Tommy’s firefighter cousin, must confront their feelings about something they’ve spent much of the show’s history trying to forget. Wounds that appear healed turn out to be raw; tempers flare over the commodification of a tragedy as a coffee-table book; the already fragile stability of several characters is threatened. And the plot unfolds with the show’s signature mixture of bleak comedy, scatological raunch, rage, booze and Catholic guilt  a blend of toughness and sentimentality that keeps “Rescue Me” very much Mr. Leary’s baby.

As far as Mr. Leary was concerned, the 9/11 plotline was inevitable. If it haunts him, it’s going to haunt his alter ego. Mr. Leary, 51, who is also a producer of the show, isn’t Tommy Gavin, but the resemblance is no accident: both men are Irish-Americans, lapsed Catholics, sometime hockey players and prone to hyperverbal explosions of caustic wit. More to the point, Mr. Leary, like Tommy, had a cousin who died while fighting a fire  not on Sept. 11, 2001, but in December 1999 in Worcester, Mass.

“My cousin’s memorial is going to be this fall,” Mr. Leary said in an interview on the set, “and that’s a big claw right behind the backs of my family and of a lot of firefighters up in Massachusetts. None of us want to admit it, but we all know it’s coming, and we’re all screwed up about it.”

So it made sense to Mr. Leary to remind viewers that Tommy has never escaped that day. “The big story that we’re telling, and hopefully the thing that makes the show work for people, is: How do brave men tick?” he said. “A lot of our story is about the fact that you have to keep running away from grief in order to sustain the bravery and insanity of what they do for a living.”

Returning to the subject is a risky move at a risky moment. Ratings for “Rescue Me” through its first four seasons were remarkably steady, with the first telecast of each new episode drawing between 2.7 and 3 million viewers. But thanks to the writers’ strike of late 2007 and early 2008 the show has been off the air for 18 months, the kind of hiatus that almost always diminishes a show’s audience.

FX has responded with several unusual votes of confidence: a supersize 22-episode order (a rarity for basic cable, where a season typically is never more than 13 episodes), a plan to run those shows over 22 straight weeks, a 10-city “Rescue Me” comedy tour headlined by Mr. Leary, and a commitment to a sixth season of 18 episodes, to begin in 2010.